ITALY A leap in the dark for the PCI THE congress of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) which took place in Rimini on February 3, 1991, was a major event in the history of the Italian workers' movement. Founded in January 1921 with adherence to the Communist International, the PCI has been the leading political party of the Italian working class for decades, through some very tough social conflicts and in a context of mass politicization.
At the end of the congress, the PCI formally disappeared; in its place is a formation with a more or less liberal-socialist orientation, which believes that the basic opposition between social classes and their political parties is obsolete. The change is expressed in the adoption of an anodyne new name:
the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS). MAITAN about had failed to "emerge". In fact only people who were already in the PDS' orbit — some of them having been elected to Parliament or city councils thanks to its support — got their PDS card. Furthermore, at the first meeting of the National Council, which was to elect the general secretary, Ochetto failed to get the necessary quorum; apart from the technical problems this poses, it shows that he is challenged even inside the majority coalition.4
Finally, on the day after the congress, the results of the elections to the new national leading organs, and the manoeuvres around the appointment of local leaderships, sparked off poorly concealed conflicts.
This was the case for example, in Turin and Milan, while in Genoa, according to the Party's own daily: "the enthusiasm of a year ago has turned rather cold." Some made no attempt to hide their disillusionment. The PDS is also in danger of being afflicted with big regional unevenness: according to the Rinascita review , nearly half of the members are concentrated in two regions, Emilia and Tuscany.
Hopes of rapid change abandoned
Awareness of all these difficulties has led members and even some leaders to set their project of "the alternative" in the longer term, leaving behind the hopes for rapid change of a year ago.
So far, Ochetto's operation has had a result diametrically opposed to that intended: the new party's contours are no clearer than those of the PCI, its sphere of
LIVIO MAITAN influence remains limited and it is torn by deep and unhealing conflicts.
The main contradiction that threatens it comes from, on the one hand, its capacity to swiftly profit from the advantages of having a new skin, and on the other the need to maintain contact with the aspirations of its base and traditional electorate.
This contradiction was shown up by the Gulf war. One day the PDS voted in the parliamentary debate in favour of the conclusions of Prime Minister Andreotti in defence of intervention (if with some reservations), then the next day the party criticized Bush's decision to launch the ground war.
These oscillations have been less visible in the party's daily l' Unità. Supporters of the war have been able to put their views in its columns more often and with more room than the "pacifists" or even supporters of the party line.
In a little more than a year, the PDS will 1. The text presented by Ochetto got 67% of the vote, that of Ingrao-Tortorella 26.6% and Bassolino's 5.7%. Only 29.9% of party members voted. The official figure for the party's membership before the congress was 1,280,000. 2. See International Viewpoint, no. 183, April 23, 1990, and no. 194, November 12, 1990. 3. In August 1990, when the PCI abstained on the govemment's decision to send ships to the Gulf, Ingrao distanced himself from this attitude by a parliamentary declaration and did not take part in the vote. Some 20 of the party's deputies supported his position. 4. The PDS Congress elected a National Council, a sort of parliament with 547 members. The Council in its tum elected a leadership of 118 members, which elected a "Political Coordination" of 24 members. 5. In the 1970s Rinascità, the party's review since the end of the war, had a very big circulation (around 100,000). But it has recently stopped publication owing to a dramatic fall in sales. 6. Normally the legislative elections should take place in 1992. By-elections and the regional elections in Sic- 23 ily take place in May 1991. April 1, 1991 • #203 International Viewpoint
ITALY face a stiff electoral test.® If it fails, its whole perspective will be to a considerable extent compromised.
Rather than aspiring to the heights of the most important European social democratic parties, it will be haunted by the prospect of sharing the fate of the Spanish Communist Party, with all its past splits and its present impasse.
This danger is all the greater in that the split which took place at the end of the congress was much more significant than expected.
This split had been months in the making, even if those involved had maintained a certain vagueness about their plans for tactical reasons.
However, at the congress itself, apart from certain purely formal reservations, all was made clear, above all in the interventions by Armando Cossutta and Sergio Garavini.
Cossutta concentrated his attack on international politics, presenting a very different picture from that in Ochetto's report, from which all mention of imperialism was absent.
For Cossutta, the PDS' basic ambiguity resided in the fact that: "the PDS has severed its moorings with the Communist framework, thus losing its oppositional identity and its character as a force for change and human liberation and is now uncertain of its bearings: it is neither a government party nor an opposition party."
Basic weakness of Ochetto project
Garavini also pointed to the basic weaknesses in Ochetto's project: "It has been explained to us that the end of the Cold War and traditional anti-Communism would open the way to an opening-up of the political system, the coming of a wholly leftist government, through the alternation of different majorities. It is obvious however that there is not the slightest sign of such an outcome."
His conclusion was fairly vague: "we need a project of democratic reform and renewal that is based on the Communist culture; but this project does not correspond to the reasons for the PDS' existence."
Nonetheless the meaning of this is clearly that the most radical wing of the opposition to Ochetto was not going to join the new party.
A month after Rimini, those who left seem to have the wind in their sails — their successes have exceeded all their hopes. The national and local assemblies they have organized have brought together thousands of people in an enthusiastic atmosphere.
What they call the "Movement for A Communist Refoundation" has alread some tens of thousands of supporters 24 mp Or a he an also bad level. teen The break has also had a significant International Viewpoint #203 • April 1, 1991 senators and three deputies, along with many municipal, provincial and regional councillors have joined the new movement.
It is harder to see what is happening in the unions. No member of the present national leadership of the Italian General Confederation of Labour (CGIL) has joined, but it is different at the local level. Here cadres and leaders have already signed up and are preparing for the next CGIL congress that is to take place in July 1991.
The debate on the nature of the new organization, to be decided at a national meeting scheduled for the end of April, is already underway.
In broad terms, there are two main schools of thought: the first wants a movement, the second a party. There is also a discussion on the possibilities of creating links of a federal type with other parties and organizations of the left (the PDS, the Greens, Democrazia Proletaria and others).
One of the reasons put forward for such a project is that the PDS is far from being a stable organization, and that there could well be other breakaways in the not too distant future.
It remains the case that this new formation, including its leadership, brings together currents with significant differences.
Thus, there are those who are nostalgic for the old party of the immediate postwar period, if not for the Stalin epoch, and who regretted the breaking of relations with Moscow under the reign of Enrico Berlinguer®; those who hark back to the party of the 1970s and early 1980s; those who, while having made strong criticisms of the party's policies for years, always stayed in it, but who have refused to stay when the party sloughed off its last skin; finally, there are those ex-supporters of the Italian Socialist Party for Proletarian Unity who rejoined the PCI when that party dissolved.?
Cossutta wing has greater weight
It would be risky to try to estimate the relative strengths of these currents now. But the weight of Cossutta's supporters is greater than that of the other elements in the proto-leadership bodies and the embryonic apparatuses at a local level.
For the moment, the "Refoundation Movement" has not come up with a programmatic statement nor a precise political project. To get a clearer picture it will be necessary to wait at least until the national meeting in April 1991.
But both in the texts presented to the last two congresses of the PCI and in the declarations made since the split, it is clear that the new movement is resolutely opposed to the abandonment by the PDS of its identity as a workers movement and rejects all subordination to the imperialist objectives of NATO and of the coalition that intervened in the Gulf. But the least one can say on other basic questions is that things are more confused.
It is likely that those nostalgic for Stalinism represent a mere handful, which will not have a big influence on future developments.
On the other hand, there seems to be a broad consensus for a favourable attitude to Gorbachevism, or, more precisely, to a vision of a self-reform of the bureaucracy.
As for the Italian workers movement, there is no clear break with the gradualist and reformist conceptions which have characterized the postwar PCI, from Togliatti to Berlinguer.
### Renewal or residual phenomenon?
The question remains open, therefore, as to whether this new formation will be able to contribute, within the limits of its strength, to a renewal of the Italian workers movement, after the bankruptcy of its major party — which requires a clear understanding that we are entering a quite new period.
Or if, in the end, it turns out to be nothing more than a residual phenomenon with no real future. And it has to be said that so far the elements of continuity with the old party seem to be prevailing over the desire for innovation.
This is reflected, among other ways, by the approach adopted to Democrazia Proletaria (DP), which underlined at its last congress the importance of the conflicts inside the PCI and has insisted since then on the need to address the question of a communist refoundation. 1°
Present in the different assemblies of the new movement, DC has expressed its desire to immediately establish close links with it at every level and in the social movements. But such offers have come up against something of a blank wall.
Sometimes the reply has been that the new regroupment must sort out its own principled positions before thinking of engaging in common activity with others.
In these conditions, DP has decided to launch a series of initiatives in the coming months and to put on the agenda of its next congress a discussion of the issue of communist refoundation, in all of its aspects. * 7. In Italy party memberships tend to be much higher than in the rest of Europe. Even parties with minimal electoral influence claim to have some hundreds of thousands of members. 8. Cossutta is not a leader formed in the classical Stalinist school. At the end of the 1950s and in the 1960s he was at the head of those who ousted the old guard in Milan. 9. The PSTUP was bome out of a split in 1964 in the PSI, at the moment when the latter decided to join a centre-left govemment. After a devastating failure in the legislative elections of 1972 it dissolved. A majority of its members rejoined the PSI, a minority went into the PCI. 10. See /V 178, February 12, 1990 and no. 194.
BRITAIN
British state forced to release Birmingham Six AFTER over 16 years the British Working class men with families, state has been forced to settled in the Birmingham area, the recognize the innocence of the Six were an unlikely team of bombers. Nor is it credible that an IRA six Irishmen convicted In 1975 of active service unit would set off having carried out the together for a hard-drinking trip to Birmingham pub bombings of Belfast within hours of having car-
Tried out such a serious bombing, November 1974. The men, Paddy given the close police surveillance Hill, Billy Power, Richard of the ports that was likely. NoneMelikenny, Gerry Hunter, John theless, the men were picked up for handful of politicians who campaigned on behalf of the Six, most prominently left Labour MP Chris Mullin.
Meanwhile, as the campaign for the release of the Six began to gather steam in local Labour Parties and trade unions over the past few years, the Labour leadership did everything in its power to stifle such demands. Similarly, whilst the Irish government is now falling over itself to claim credit for the release of the Six, it remained for many years hostile to the campaign for their release and used its influence, particularly in the United States, to undermine it.
The poison of occupation
There are few in Britain who have
Walker, and Hugh Callaghan, were finally freed on March 14
(see IV 198 for details of the campaign leading up to the men's release).
BERNARD GIBBONS T HE release followed their third attempt to appeal against their conviction within 16 years. Their last appeal was turned down as recently as January 1988, with Appeal Court judge Lord Lane saying he and his two fellow judges had become "more and not less convinced" of the men's guilt.
The background to the men's final victory included the freeing of the Guildford Four in October 1989 (the Four had been framed at around the same time as the Six, and in similar circumstances — see IV 173 for details), and the disbandment of the West Midlands Serious Crimes Squad, responsible for the interrogation of the Six in 1974 — there is overwhelm- no tale suns been ing evidence now that the squad has been framing people systematically over a period of many years. Moreover, new scientific tests revealed that the police had fabricated evidence presented at the men's initial trial, and the forensic evidence purporting to show that some of the men had handled explosives had been entirely discredited.
The IRA's 1974 bombing of two pubs in Birmingham killed 21 people and injured 162. The men were arrested the day after the bombings, while travelling to Belfast from their homes in Birmingham. They were going to attend the funeral of James Mcdade, a member of the IRA who had been killed while carrying out a bombing operation in Coventry. Mcdade had been a popular singer and personality in the Birmingham Irish community, and had grown up in the same tiny Catholic enclave in Belfast as several of the men.
questioning and the police decided they had found some people to hang the bombings on. The men were tortured and forced to sign faked confessions.
Riddled with inaccuracies, contradictions, and improbable stage Irish expressions, the confessions should not have stood up to scrutiny in any law court worthy of the name. But the British state had found its scapegoats, and at their 1975 trial the judge said that the men had been convicted "on the clearest and most overwhelming evidence I have ever heard".
Unprecedented legal conspiracy
At the men's initial trial, the judge had also said that, if they were innocent, it would mean that the police were involved in a conspiracy "unprecedented in British legal history". This has now been shown to be the case, and moreover it is evident that the most senior judges in the land have connived in that conspiracy. But it is doubtful that any but the lowliest participants in the crime will ever suffer any punishment for it. Instead of launching a direct investigation into the direct investioation into tha
Birmingham case, the government has appointed a Royal
Commission with a vague remit to review the judicial system.
Few people in Britain emerge from the Birmingham
Six case with any credit. Pride of place must go to the families of the jailed men, who campaigned to prove their innocence with an incredible innocence with an incredible tenacity, and in the face of almost universal hostility until the state case began to crumble in the mid-1980s. Then there are the men's lawyers, the tiny handful of investigative journalists who worked to unravel the convictions in a series of television programmes, and the much tinier pointed out that it is the unjust and ultimately untenable British occupation of a part of Ireland that is at the root of the poison which continues to slowly work its way through the British body politic -whether it is through frame-up cases like the Birmingham 6 or the Guildford 4, the continuing saga of the shoot-to-kill policy and army collaboration with loyalist death squads in Ireland itself, the cover-up around the execution of three IRA volunteers in Gibraltar, or any of the other scandals that continue to simmer away.
It is not often that six working class Irish nationalists have the ear of the world to denounce British justice for the sham that it is, and the Birmingham Six are determined to use to the full the brief moment they will have to do so. In interviews since their release, they have insistently taken up the cases of others unjustly jailed, and they can be expected to be at the forefront of the campaign against the extradition of Irish prisoners to Britain.